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SURF: collaborative workplace redesign

Production companies are usually exposed to a variety of challenges that have often been understood mostly in economic and technological terms by neglecting a critical factor for sustainable organisational success: the human being. The result is a misalign- ment between business goals and human factors, that can be attributed to a lack of sup- port and encouragement for human participation, learning and personal development within organisation.

Within the EU SO-PC-Pro (Subject-Orientation for People-Centred Production) projectwe have worked towards the development of methods and tools for holistic design and management of work-places in production companies, thereby aligning business goals and human needs.

A specific tool for achieving this goal is SURF (Subject-oriented sUggestions for Re-design of Factory workplaces). SURF aims at empowering people in production companies, by making

workers active participants in the workplace redesign process;

managers aware of problems and supported by work- ers in the workplace improvement.

To this aim, SURF provides a collaborative, user-friendly environment enabling workers to report and discuss issues and possible so- lutions, a workflow engine making the suggestion process transparent to workers and managers, and a process editor able to support designers and decision makers (i.e, the company management) with workers’ suggestions, when a re-design effort is required.